From the Urgent Pedagogies Issue #3: Modalities, this text by Marc Neelen and Ana Džokić describe how they are using the curatorial as a method for speculating futures within institutional contexts, employing a fictive approach that engages critically with the neoliberal urbanization of Eastern and Western Europe´s geographies.

From the Archive re-surfaces pieces that have previously been published as part of Urgent Pedagogies Issues.

Drafting future scenarios 2029, process for Enterprises of Survival, Bezdan, 2019. Photo by STEALTH.unlimited.

Future fiction: an explorative method for self-learning

Marc Neelen and Ana Džokić, STEALTH.unlimited

“Pressured to find a way out, to plot a necessary long-term strategy to secure ‘our’ survival, we once more decided to call upon future fiction to make a jump ahead.”

How can we desire something if we can’t even imagine it yet? How do we anticipate what could cross our path – or obstruct it – if we can’t picture the voyage to arrive there? And to choose the right companions for such a journey, if we can’t envision where to start from? These questions have confronted us increasingly during the last decade while exploring alternate urban futures that might lay ahead. Thus, for us, future fiction has become a method not only to grasp aspirations better but equally to “preview” how such different realities could unfold.

Using future fiction as a playful but equally powerful tool has been a long story in the making. In 2011, a few years following the start of the Global Financial Crisis, we delved into a universe of pioneering communities to understand how they might envision a city (in part) co-created through their collective actions. Their city was Bordeaux, and time seemed right to offer such a future perspective. As large-scale urban developments got stalled across Europe, it looked like space for a different take on the city had opened up. This broader context and a generously funded urban biannual (under the artistic direction of Michelangelo Pistoletto) allowed us, co-curator Emil Jurcan and the architecture center arc en rêve, to envision a horizon different from the usual autopilot neoliberal course. We started from the question: How would the future look if citizens’ collective capacity would grow and become Bordeaux’s primary driving force? It resulted in a piece of social fiction in the format of a novella and exhibition. Once Upon a Future became an imaginary fast-forward to a possible Bordeaux of 2030 – giving an unexpected twist to that target year by which the city authorities aimed to surpass the magic threshold of one million inhabitants.

What started from the ambitions of remarkable but vulnerable pioneering communities on the ground in our hands grew into the silhouette of a 2030 urban reality – in which they are no longer marginalised underdogs but have instead become dominant practices. Working with writer and philosopher Bruce Bégout and a dozen local graphic and comic artists, a still rather abstract future suddenly acquired personalities and names, precise locations, dates and events, colour, smell. It got narration, voices, rhythm and pace. It counted breakthroughs and defeats. It became possible to identify with it, absorb it, or reject it. And in the latter, one could choose to plot a different trajectory instead. Although, to a large extent (still) wishful thinking, drawing it out became an important, empowering and insightful method. To the featured local groups, it opened a possibility to place their endeavours into a larger whole, propelled far enough in time to detach from daily preoccupations. To ourselves, it proved a confrontational experience. Would we be ready to wait some twenty years for such a different city to arrive, or should we instead start acting in that direction?